A LACK of international co-operation among scientists is hampering efforts to prepare for an avian flu pandemic, the senior expert on infectious diseases for the World Health Organisation said yesterday.

Scientists who joined forces to identify and contain the Sars virus in 2003 are failing to share data on H5N1 influenza in the same way, according to Margaret Chan, the WHO’s assistant director-general for communicable diseases.

Closer collaboration is needed to improve avian flu surveillance and enhance vaccine research. It will be too late if scientists wait for a human pandemic before pooling resources to fight it, she told The Times.

Dr Chan’s comments came as British veterinary officials complained yesterday that Turkey was being too slow to send virus samples from birds suspected to have died of avian flu for laboratory analysis here. It was confirmed last night that the sample virus will arrive from Turkey this afternoon. But this means that the results of tests will not be known until Thursday.

Other virologists have expressed similar concerns about slow distribution of samples, saying that those critical to tracking genetic mutations and vaccine development are taking too long to be placed in the public domain.

Vietnam has been criticised for taking weeks or months to confirm and report human cases of avian flu and share samples of the virus responsible with foreign labs. Scientists have also accused the US Centres for Disease Control of being too slow to deposit genetic sequences of its H5N1 samples in public databases.

Prompt access to this information is important to ensure that researchers keep abreast of changes in the virus that may make it more likely to start moving from person to person — a key step towards a pandemic. Up-to-date virus samples are also essential to vaccine research.

Delays are often caused by logistical problems in countries without modern disease surveillance networks, Dr Chan said. But there are also suspicions that some scientists are holding on to information to ensure that they get the credit for important work.

“In some instances it’s true that we would like the specimens to be shared in a more timely manner,” Dr Chan said. “In the academic sector, some people, in a small number of institutions, may have accumulated specimens and may not be as ready to share with outer academic colleagues as we would like.”

The WHO official, who was the director of health in Hong Kong during the Sars outbreak two years ago, said that the present level of international co-operation compared poorly with the Sars crisis.

“That was a time when we were really working together as an international community of academics, politicians, public health experts, everybody really was so focused,” she said. “Everybody was trying to do his or her best to contain the spread of this disease. “The thing with avian flu is we are not yet in a pandemic. And in peacetime or during a crisis it’s interesting how people’s minds operate in different modes. When the crisis is over, the energy and willingness to co-operate and come together and be focused on one objective is diluted.” She urged researchers to overcome this and revive the spirit of co-operation that existed during Sars. “Sars affected 30 countries, with about 800 dead and a rough loss to the global economy of about $30 billion,” Dr Chan said. “That pales in comparison to a flu pandemic. I hope that the magnitude of a pandemic will give people a sense that we really need to co-operate now and not wait until there is a pandemic. That would be too late.”

Albert Osterhaus, a flu expert from the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, agreed that international collaboration was inadequate. He said: “The WHO is doing a fabulous job. But it is clear that international collaboration and co-operation is sub-optimal at the moment. It is not on the level of the Sars outbreak.”

He also repeated his recent call in the journal Nature for a global task force to co-ordinate research into avian flu.

www.timesonline.co.uk/world
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